The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Bad Animal by Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer

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Pastoral with Birds

I crept into the November night to watch. The door opened, bent
like a broken finger, and outside, the first snow of the season,
blanching the concrete. My old car in the lot, dusted, as though with
confectioner’s sugar and rusted from nineteen years of travel. My feet, traveled
and bone-sore, toes curled against the cold. And around me in that darkness,
the chittering of small creatures: a black squirrel scavenging the ground,
in the trees, miscellaneous birds. I have measured the years
by the beating of their wings, by the worms bisected in their
beaks. I watched them scrabble in the winter months: the waxwing,
the cardinal, the American robin. Once, a snowy owl perched
on the branch of a dead tree in my front yard, and I thought its tracks were
the handwriting of God. This had something to do with my dying grandmother
and symbolism I think, the picture my father had sent me, where she was hooked
to the world by a needle in her arm: red tube against white sheets, like the
chokeberry bush outside my childhood home against snow. I waited
for the season to deliver me to a better understanding. I fed the owl: a mouse had died
behind the kitchen cabinets. For days I wondered where the death-smell
was coming from, and when I found it, I wondered how I hadn’t heard it
squeaking, and how it died alone, not unlike my grandmother. I carried it out
with a pair of tongs. I left it on the garden path. I let nature do its yearning,
bloody work, watched the owl devour the body of the mouse and felt nothing
except a singular kind of regret: that I was not small enough to warrant
such a dispatch, that I had not died too, and what’s more, my death would not
be useful. It would be just a death. The bird, just a bird.